How God Got So Great - The New Yorker

This past October, Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech mogul now running for governor of Ohio, appeared in Montana at an event hosted by Turning Point USA. After speaking for twenty minutes, he fielded questions from more than a dozen students. Some were about his Hindu faith. One student asked why Ramaswamy was “masquerading as a Christian.” Another, a senior from New York, described Turning Point as a “monotheistic organization” and then, squinting, voiced his confusion. “I don’t understand why a Hin”—he corrected himself—“a polytheistic ideology would support some sort of monotheistic perspective.”

Ramaswamy has become adept at flipping questions about his religion into sound-bite-worthy affirmations of his commitment to the Constitution. This time, however, he was challenged not for being a non-Christian but for worshipping many deities, and he seemed compelled to parry the suspicion. “I’m actually a monotheist,” he said, in his polished baritone. “I believe there’s one true God.”

You don’t need to attend a Turning Point rally to see that monotheism operates as a moral credential in American public life. The nation’s official motto, “In God we trust,” has appeared on coins since the Civil War. The Pledge of Allegiance promises loyalty to “one nation under God.” The Boy Scouts of America claims a nonsectarian stance yet requires Scouts to uphold a “duty to God”—again, God in the singular. Although Americans are rarely asked to weigh in on polytheism, surveys consistently show that not believing in God is among the biggest political liabilities—more electorally costly than being gay, Black, Jewish, Muslim, or female. Politicians have learned to read these signals. When Tulsi Gabbard first ran for Congress, in 2012, poised to become its first Hindu member, she was derided by her Republican opponent for following a religion that “doesn’t align with the constitutional foundation of the U.S. government.” She later affirmed her monotheism. And when Piyush (Bobby) Jindal was first elected as a U.S. representative from Louisiana, in 2004, he did so as a Catholic convert, sidestepping the conversation altogether.

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The United States isn’t alone in urging a commitment to the One. During the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre engineered a new monotheistic faith, the Cult of the Supreme Being, meant to inspire virtue among France’s new republicans. Indonesia’s founding principles include belief in “the One and Only God” (“Ketuhanan yang Maha Esa”); until 2017, the state formally recognized only six religions, including monotheistic variants of Hinduism and Confucianism. In 1999, a Salafi militant group called Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, or Group of Monotheism and Jihad, formed in Jordan. After pledging fealty to Al Qaeda, the group was eventually reorganized as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. An early Islamic State credo announced the “necessity of destroying and eradicating all manifestations of shirk, and prohibiting those things that lead to it.” Shirk, sometimes translated as “idolatry,” is better understood as allowing for divine powers other than the true God.

For all its moral and political weight, monotheism is surprisingly hard to pin down. The standard definition—belief in one deity—fails to hold up, at least when judged against the thoughts and practices of actual believers. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity may be singular in principle, but in practice most Americans endorse statements that are heretical because they imply separateness, such as the claim that “Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God.” There’s also the litany of supernatural creatures who populate supposedly monotheistic universes. Edward Tylor, a founder of cultural anthropology, observed, in 1871, “Beings who in Christian or Moslem theology would be called angels, saints, demons, would under the same definitions be called deities in polytheistic settings.”

An alternative approach might insist on an all-powerful supreme being. Yet here, too, the major monotheisms seem to falter. The late sociologist of religion Rodney Stark argued that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are better understood as “dualistic monotheisms.” Each, he held, counterbalances a divine supreme being with one or more evil but weaker adversaries.

Hence the paradox. There is something unmistakably potent about religions that purport to revere one God. Within a century of the Prophet Muhammad’s death, Arab armies had conquered Persia and taken much of Byzantium, assembling the largest empire that the world had seen. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in less than two hundred years, has grown from a persecuted American sect to a global religion with millions of adherents. It is impossible to grasp how profoundly trends like these have transformed humanity. A few millennia ago, the world comprised an intricate patchwork of local cults and folk traditions, but half of humanity now identifies as either Christian or Muslim. Stark speculated that “monotheism may well have been the single most significant innovation in history”—a civilizational engine that was perhaps responsible for mass missionizing, the scientific revolution, and the end of slavery. Yet this only adds to the puzzle. How can a concept carry so much social, moral, and historical weight when so many attempts to define it prove incoherent? Why does being monotheistic matter if so few of us truly are?

A spate of recent books—among them Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s “God: An Anatomy” (Knopf), David Michael Grossberg’s “The Evolution of Jewish Monotheism” (Cambridge), and Will Gervais’s “Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species” (Prometheus)—have sought to deepen our understanding of monotheism. Several approach it historically. An early flicker appeared in Egypt in the fourteenth century B.C.E., when the pharaoh Amenhotep IV launched a religious revolution. Setting himself against the priesthood, he established a cult devoted to the sun disk, Aten, changed his name to Akhenaten, and ordered the defacement of inscriptions, to remove references to other deities. The reforms were short-lived. Not long after his death, the pharaoh Tutankhaten—his son, probably—restored the old religion and took the name Tutankhamun, in honor of the pantheon’s principal deity, Amun. Akhenaten was purged from the historical record, later remembered only as “the criminal” or “the rebel.”

There were other early intimations of divine singularity. Zoroastrians worshipped Ahura Mazda. Vedic thinkers gestured toward a transcendental oneness. But today’s most influential vision of monotheism—the God of Abraham—descends from another ancient figure: the early Israelite deity YHWH. Exactly how devotees pronounced this god’s name is impossible to know. It may have been “Yah,” or “Yaho,” or “Yahu.” Greco-Roman scholars called him Yahweh, and the convention stuck.

Before he was God, Yahweh was a subordinate figure in a polytheistic drama headed by El, the white-bearded king of the gods. El was worshipped throughout the ancient Levant, and, together with his consort Asherah, he presided over an assembly of deities who included the storm god, Baal; the sea god, Yam; and the ruler of the underworld, Mot. Traces of this early polytheism are still preserved in the Hebrew Bible. The Eighty-second Psalm declares, “God has taken his place in the divine assembly; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment.”

El, not Yahweh, was probably the original patron deity of the people called Israel. This is suggested throughout the Bible, as in Genesis 33:20: “There he set up an altar and called it El Elohe Israel,” meaning El, the God of Israel. “El” also lingers in personal names such as Samuel and Daniel, and, most conspicuously, in the name Israel itself, yisra-El.

Yahweh was a god of weather and war, bursting with thunder and rain clouds and associated with a mountainous wilderness beyond the Dead Sea. Around the turn of the first millennium B.C.E., he displaced El as Israel’s heavenly head. Exactly why remains debated, though the shift may have been tied to the rise of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and the need for a more explicitly militarized theology—an opening well suited to a warrior figure like Yahweh. Even after his ascent, however, the Israelite world view appears to have remained polytheistic. Yahweh continued to exist alongside other gods, demanding only that his people give him priority, a practice known as monolatry. In the First Commandment, for example, he does not deny the existence of other deities; he merely insists that none be placed “before me.”

Followers of the Abrahamic religions are supposed to treat God as immaterial and incorporeal, yet these early Yahweh worshippers imagined him as fully embodied. Drawing on textual and archeological evidence, including depictions of related Near Eastern gods, Stavrakopoulou reconstructs Yahweh as she thinks his followers conceived him. He was immense. He likely had dense forearms, bulging biceps, and glistening red skin. His penis, if it resembled El’s, was long and circumcised. His countenance shimmered between El’s aged authority and the youthful ferocity of a thunderer. His ears were probably pierced.

When the Assyrians conquered Israel, in 722 B.C.E., and the Babylonians devastated Judah, in 588 B.C.E., they also destroyed Yahweh’s temples, possibly including statues of Yahweh himself. It was around this time that the familiar contours of Abrahamic monotheism began to coalesce. An idea gained ground that gods other than Yahweh did not truly exist, or else were inferior beings, qualitatively different from him. New Biblical texts, including Deuteronomy and large portions of Isaiah, were composed. Older passages were revised. Insistent formulas proliferated: “There is no other”; “There is none besides.”

The sheer volume of these claims, and the constant polemic against rival gods, suggests that not everyone was persuaded. Biblical authors and redactors were adamant about Yahweh’s exclusive divinity, but a substantial contingent of believers evidently required convincing. As Jewish identity crystallized during and after the Babylonian exile, polytheism remained an enduring temptation.

These currents of the first millennium B.C.E. eventually shaped the theologies of the three major Abrahamic faiths—Islam, Christianity, and Judaism—and informed a family of related monotheisms, including Yazidism, Druzism, and the religion into which I was born, Sikhism. Searching for a single key to monotheism across such varied traditions, however, is like trying to identify a facial feature shared by members of a large family. Resemblances appear in clusters, but no trait clearly belongs to everyone. Practitioners themselves have long recognized that “oneness” is not a single, uncontested idea: traditions differ over how far you can speak of distinction within the divine without ceasing to speak of one God at all. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity has been an especially durable flash point. A passage from the Jerusalem Talmud, written around the fifth century C.E., records a rabbi explaining to sectarians—Christians, apparently—that God was not three but one. A century or so later, the Quran was less patient: “Those who say that God is the third of three are unbelievers.”

We might expect to have more success focussing on a single tradition, yet here, too, we find astounding variety—a fact powerfully demonstrated by Grossberg’s book, which tracks the concept of Jewish monotheism across three millennia. Because his account is driven largely by textual sources, it necessarily centers on the views of educated élites; all the same, it makes clear how capacious the claim “God is one” has turned out to be.

The chief expression of Jewish monotheism appears in Deuteronomy 6:4, at the opening of the prayer known as the Shema, when Moses declares, “Hear, O Israel: YHWH our God, YHWH is one.” By around 200 C.E., this verse was treated as “the central theological foundation of Judaism,” as Grossberg notes. It is important in Christianity as well. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is asked which commandment matters most, and he cites this passage. But it likely meant something different in its original context. The Hebrew is ambiguous when it comes to the placement of the verb “to be,” and the line can just as readily be translated as “YHWH is our God, YHWH alone”—the rendering adopted by the Jewish Publication Society in 1999. In either case, Grossberg argues, the verse points less to Yahweh’s singular divinity than to his incomparability, expressing something closer to “Yahweh is the greatest among gods” than to “Yahweh is the only god.”

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Throughout two millennia, interpretations of “God is one” have ranged widely. Philo of Alexandria, the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher, took it to mean that only one God exists and that he is unlike anything else. But, grappling with the problem of how a transcendent deity interacts with a mundane world, he posited a bureaucracy of divine intermediaries led by the Logos, the Word, which he variously described as “God’s First-born,” “the image of God,” and even a “second God.” This line of thought, known as subordinationism, would become a significant strand of Jewish theology and go on to shape early Christian belief. Ancient polytheists sometimes wondered how dissimilar it really was from their own supernatural hierarchies, as when the pagan philosopher Celsus remarked, “It makes no difference whether one calls god ‘Supreme’ or Zeus or Adonai or Sabaoth or Ammon such as the Egyptians do or Papaios as the Scythians.”

Rabbinic writers soon rejected subordinationism, and yet, Grossberg shows, interpretations of oneness continued to multiply. Maimonides believed that God’s singularity was so radical that he could be described only through negation. Medieval Kabbalists envisioned a Godhead that expressed itself through ten emanations. Baruch Spinoza argued for a singular godly substance of which everything in existence is an attribute.

Modern Jewish thought, particularly under the pressure of science, has pushed oneness to its definitional limits. Grossberg offers the example of the influential Israeli thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz. Born in Riga, in 1903, Leibowitz became a dazzling polymath—a professor of biochemistry and neurophysiology at Hebrew University, an editor of the Encyclopedia Hebraica, and the author of nearly a dozen books on religion, history, and science. He was a prominent and contentious figure in Israeli public life, nicknamed the Prophet of Wrath for his fierce denouncements of the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

For Leibowitz, Judaism consists of practical precepts set out in the Torah—eating kosher, refraining from work on the Sabbath. It makes no claims about the nature of reality, which means that it has no reason to conflict with science. He accepted the religious requirement to recite “YHWH is one” each day, but understood it as a necessary practice, a “slogan of faith” rather than an assertion about what exists. The implication, as Grossberg puts it, is that “the statement ‘God is one’ means nothing at all. Nothing, that is, about God.”

In the long history of Judaism, then, we encounter nearly as many readings of God’s oneness as there are divinities in a pagan pantheon. We find supremacy, multiplicity, and abstraction. We find a sovereign who acts through lesser beings, a Godhead with an elaborate internal structure, and a ritual formula drained of ontological content. Rather than constraining theology, God’s singularity seems to unmoor it, releasing a range of interpretations so wide that they verge on everything and nothing at once, pulling doctrine toward polytheism, monism, and even agnosticism.

But perhaps this is a case of being misled by a label. Monotheistic religions may have less to do with counting gods than the word suggests. Although Grossberg finds no stable positive meaning of the claim that “God is one,” he does identify a recurring negative function: the denunciation of idolatry. Even Leibowitz—so committed to scientific fact and empirical inquiry, and so adamant that religion could not make claims about reality—treated “YHWH is one” as a slogan whose primary meaning was the rejection of idolatry.

Is anti-idolatry the core of monotheism, then? Several writers have argued as much. The Israeli philosophers Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit made the case in their book “Idolatry” (1992), though the argument is most closely associated with the German Egyptologist Jan Assmann. In two volumes—“Moses the Egyptian” (1997) and its sequel, “The Price of Monotheism” (2010)—Assmann contends that monotheisms are defined by a “Mosaic distinction” separating true from false religion. These religions, and these religions alone, generate the categories of heretic and unbeliever, false god and idolater, even Devil worshipper. In Assmann’s view, ancient Israelite religion marked a decisive rupture not just because it insisted on God’s singularity but because its exclusionary logic supplied a template for later divisions and conflicts, including those “between Jews and Gentiles, Christians and pagans, Christians and Jews, Muslims and infidels” and, later still, “Catholics and Protestants, Calvinists and Lutherans, Socinians and Latitudinarians.”

The Mosaic distinction helped produce the idea of religions as distinct identity groups. In Greco-Roman antiquity, people adopted new gods—including imports from as far away as Egypt and Syria—without relinquishing their existing cultic commitments. Gods were “supplements rather than alternatives,” as the Harvard classicist Arthur Darby Nock put it. Only after an ascendant Christianity cast paganism as its opposite did it become possible to think of “conversion” in the modern sense.

All the same, the Mosaic distinction was neither necessary nor sufficient for religious expansion. Buddhism and Hinduism spread across East and Southeast Asia without it, while many monotheisms—Judaism among them—remained bound to particular peoples. Yet Christianity and Islam could not have conquered the world without such a distinction. Once a god becomes the only legitimate referent for the term “God,” it can be severed from place and kin. It becomes portable. Missionizing, understood as the spread of truth and the eradication of falsehood, turns into a moral obligation, driving a religion outward.

The Mosaic distinction helps explain the force of oneness, however slippery the theological details. Polytheism, by its nature, tends toward pluralism. The presence of multiple gods, each worthy of veneration, creates room for ideological, and even moral, diversity. In India, for instance, some marginalized communities reportedly venerate condemned divinities of Hindu mythology, such as the demon-king Ravana, as a form of anti-Brahmanic resistance. An enforced oneness forecloses such heterodoxy. Differences of allegiance are taken as errors about divine truth, if not outright heresy.

Through this exclusion, the Mosaic distinction serves, paradoxically, as an instrument of social cohesion. Just as groups in American prisons in the nineteen-fifties became more formidable once they required mutually exclusive membership, identities defined against unbelief can foster solidarity and shared purpose. By collapsing moral authority into a single, nonnegotiable source, the Mosaic distinction also generates trust among co-religionists. People do not merely believe in the power of belief to make others compliant; they expect others to follow the same moral script, making coöperation on larger scales possible.

Few historical episodes illustrate this more clearly than do the Arab conquests. Within two decades of Muhammad’s death, in 632 C.E., Arab forces had toppled the Sasanian Persian Empire and seized Byzantine Syria and Egypt. By 720, the Umayyad Caliphate stretched from the Iberian Peninsula to what is now Afghanistan. The book “In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire” (2015), by the N.Y.U. historian Robert Hoyland, catalogues the conditions that abetted this expansion, including prolonged warfare between Persia and Byzantium, recurring outbreaks of plague which weakened both empires, and centuries of Arab military expertise. Yet these factors alone cannot explain how a force of roughly two hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, drawn from diverse tribal and ethnic backgrounds, sustained coördinated action against two of the world’s most formidable states. Even Hoyland, wary of reducing the story to religious fervor, acknowledges the role of Islam in forging a singular moral community, mobilized against the enemies of God.

Back in October, Ramaswamy explained himself as best he could to the student and the rest of the Turning Point audience. He invoked the Holy Trinity as an analogy and spoke of the task, in every religion, “of reconciling the one and the many.” He then asked the student, “Do you think it’s inappropriate for someone who’s a Hindu to be, say, a U.S. President?”

“No, I think it’s...” the student began, then stopped. He mouthed a word, closed his eyes, and stalled. “Well,” he said, before asking Ramaswamy whether Hindus believe in Shiva and “the flute god.” The student was unconvinced.

The irony is that, based on the Mosaic distinction—the insistence of true belief against false—Ramaswamy doesn’t seem to qualify as a monotheist. The Hindu school that he says he follows, Advaita Vedanta, posits a cosmic, singular everythingness, the Brahman. But it treats the veneration of other deities, including through idol worship, as helpful aids for minds unable to meditate on absolute formlessness. “Blessed are those that can realize God by breaking images,” a Vedantic swami wrote in 1928, “and blessed are those that realize Him by worshipping images.”

Whatever the exact details of his theology, there was little Ramaswamy could have said to satisfy the student. The man, like so many monotheists before him, was not asking whether Ramaswamy believes in a single divinity but, rather, whether his interpretation was the right one. Ramaswamy’s comments about the “one true God” who “appears in different forms” seemed no more persuasive than subordinationists’ attempts to win over rabbinic writers or Christian Trinitarians’ arguments to early Muslims.

Monotheism matters in America for the same reason it has always mattered: it creates shared identity through what it opposes. It can function as a shortcut to moral consensus in a nation fractured by distrust and starved of a shared ethics—one in which billionaire candidates like Ramaswamy occupy social and economic strata largely insulated from the voters they seek to court. Americans do not merely associate belief in God with moral order; in ways that Gervais, the “Disbelief” author, has detailed, they expect believers to be more trustworthy, more bound by promise, more answerable to a shared code. Yet cohesion built on exclusion sits uneasily with the ambitions of pluralistic democracy. It offers a veneer of solidarity while forcing Jains, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, agnostics, and genuine nonbelievers to perform moral acceptability in unfamiliar languages. “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him,” Voltaire famously declared. The harder, and more valuable, task is to construct moral communities that can function without Him.♦

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